1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to the JAVASCRIPT™ programming language (hereinafter referred to as JavaScript) operating in a J2EE server environment, and more specifically to a method and system for automatically creating and delivering JAVASCRIPT™ objects to invoke methods on server-side JAVA™ programming language beans (hereinafter referred to as Java beans) without the need for additional installations on the client browser machine.
2. Background of the Invention
A common problem is distributed applications, and specifically in Web applications, is how to invoke server-side code from a remote client (Web browser). Conventional solutions such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), RMI (Remote Method Invocation), and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) all address this problem. Each of these has disadvantages however, a primary disadvantage being their complexity. Other disadvantages include the requirement for an IDL (interface definition language), and additional components that need to be installed into the browser environment. For example, a client-side program has to know which parameters are required to make a call to a standard server-side servlet (such as a JSP (Java Server Page)). These parameters must be explicitly coded as a URL parameter, so that every time a server-side servlet and/or bean is changed, the client-side call must be re-programmed. In other words, the basic code must be written both on the server and the client to wire client-side calls to server-side beans. Moreover, not all remote clients should be allowed to invoke all server-side methods.
What is needed is a simple way to invoke a method on server-side Java beans that also maintains security features relating to who can invoke the methods without additional installations and other complexity on the client.